Hurricane Katrina and the myth of global warming adaptation

When it comes to climate change, prevention is more important than adaptation

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 4:28 PM on 29 Aug 2007

G. Gordon Liddy's daughter repeated a standard Denier line in our debate: Humans are very adaptable -- we've adapted to climate changes in the past and will do so in the future.

I think Hurricane Katrina gives the lie to that myth. No, I'm not saying humans are not adaptable. Nor am I saying global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, although warming probably did make it more intense. But on the two-year anniversary of Katrina, I'm saying Katrina showed the limitations of adaptation as a response to climate change, for several reasons.

First, the citizens of New Orleans "adapted" to Hurricane Katrina, but I'm certain that every last one of them wishes we had prevented the disaster with stronger levees. The multiple catastrophes -- extreme drought, extreme flooding, extreme weather, extreme temperatures -- that global warming will bring can be suffered through, but I wouldn't call it adaptation.

Second, a classic adaptation strategy to deal with rising sea levels is levees. Yet even though we knew that New Orleans would be flooded if the levees were overtopped and breached, even though New Orleans has been sinking for decades, we refused to spend the money to "adapt" New Orleans to the threat. We didn't make the levees able to withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane (Katrina was weaker at landfall than that, but the storm surge was that of a Category 4).

Third, even now, after witnessing the devastation of the city, we still refuse to spend the money needed to strengthen the levees to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. We refuse to spend money on adaptation to preserve one of our greatest cities, ensuring its destruction, probably sometime this century.

If we won't adapt to the realities of having one city below sea level in hurricane alley, what are the chances we are going to adapt to the realities of having all our great Gulf and Atlantic Coast cities at risk for the same fate as New Orleans -- since sea level from climate change will ultimately put many cities, like Miami, below sea level? And just how do you adapt to sea levels rising 6 to 12 inches a decade for centuries, which well may be our fate by 2100 if we don't reverse greenhouse-gas emissions trends soon. Climate change driven by human-caused GHGs is already happening much faster than past climate change from natural causes -- and it is accelerating.

The fact is, the Deniers don't believe climate change is happening, so they don't believe in spending money on adaptation. The Center for American Progress has written an important paper on hurricane preparedness, which is a good starting point for those who are serious about adaptation.

But don't be taken in by heartfelt expressions of faith in human adaptability. If Katrina shows us anything, it is that preventing disaster would be considerably less expensive -- and more humane -- than forcing future generations to adapt to an unending stream of disasters.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For story: Hurricane Katrina and the myth of global warming adaptation
15 Comments | Post a Comment

Adaptation is necessary unfortunately.

I loathe the thought that the deniers are grabbing onto the nonchalant talk of adaptation and twisting it to their deadly purposes. First and foremost we have to do everything we can to prevent the worst of it. That means stopping the planet temperature from rising three degrees Celsius by 2100 and falling into feedback loops of greater warming. Secondly, we are going to have to adapt.

What is great about adaptation is that the deniers won't make it. Expect to see them stuck in the suburbs without power, water or running vehicles by 2050. The ones who will make it are already starting to adapt. They are moving out of areas like Florida and New Orleans. They are planting gardens, using public transit or biking, living in a small house, buying organic food, buying local, converting their power to solar and reducing their consumption overall.

I am sad to say that New Orleans probably won't make it. Sure their will be people living there for a long while, but it has passed its peak and will further decline. Maybe people will eventually adapt but it isn't going to be by building bigger levies.

Take an example from the Netherlands. They are below sea level and they understand that they can no longer build bigger levies to stop it. They have decided as a country to not build them bigger. Instead the are moving denser to higher land and opening up their flood plain so that floods won't be as drastic. They are even building houses that supposedly float in a major flood event.

That is adaptation. Adaptation is giving up these endless struggles against mother nature and letting her show us where we need to be. That might sound a bit philosophic but it is actually practical. Nothing will prevent New Orleans from flooding again, nothing.

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by wildleaf at 5:08 PM on 29 Aug 2007

Adaptation is Good

New Orleans was a city of squalor, corruption and oppression of the poor. Those who left found better housing, better jobs and a higher quality of life.

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by jabailo at 5:28 PM on 29 Aug 2007

lol

i suppose u think God sent Katrina, and made it stronger to punish the diiiiiirty city! oh noes, wat next! bigger storms in the northeast for all those god-damned atheists?

hmmm....

by kman at 5:53 PM on 29 Aug 2007

Adaptation, too

I agree with Wildleaf. We and our children are going to have to adapt long before our efforts to prevent the worst from happening have any effect. People today are having to adapt to higher temperatures, longer droughts, more extreme flooding, dwindling water supplies. If we don't develop supportive programs for this adaptation, we're just going to accelerate the downslide of our societies.

The Dutch are exceptional. The U.S. seems very far away from having that kind of vision at the national level. Local self-determination may have to take the wheel.

by precipice at 6:28 PM on 29 Aug 2007

"The Dutch are exceptional..."

The Dutch are IDIOTS.

First you say we must "do something" then you praise a bunch of cheese eaters who stupidly built their entire country UNDER WATER.

What gives?

Does anyone have any common sense in this world?

Am I supposed to shed a tear when multi-million dollar mansions burn up in the desert hills of LA - after they spend more millions of my tax dollars to save them -- because the owners built them in dry forest land that is destined to burn?

In some of the cities along the Gulf Coast they have monuments to mark the water line -- of the LAST TIME THE COAST FLOODED THIRTY YEARS AGO. I saw one idiot on CBS News proudly pointing to it.

Hey buddy - how about READING the monument next time.

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by jabailo at 6:46 PM on 29 Aug 2007
[ Parent ]

Adaptation?

Folks, more people in the US are moving to the coasts of the US than ever. You can call it a "lemming effect" if you must, but the adaptation paradigm really doesn't seem to be relevant. As more erosion, subsidence, landslides, and sea level rise occurs, MORE people will move to the coast. If anyone can call that "adapting" with a straight face I want to see it in person.

It is much more nuanced to talk about how the dynamics are changing, such as the super-rich buying second homes by the coast and how insurance premiums for wind and flood are running off the middle and lower classes. If that's "adapting" I'll eat my hat.

BTW, the concept of saying that more powerful storms, extreme droughts, and freaky weather is called "wish-casting." Climatologists and meteorologists hate it and ridicule it.

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 6:55 PM on 29 Aug 2007

How's this for adaptation

Nationwide is adapting their insurance policies, dropping thousands of Floridians. They know what's coming even if their senator, Mel Martinez, is still pretending all is well.

Join the discussion on global warming, recycling, and organic beer at The Green Miles!

by TheGreenMiles at 7:40 PM on 29 Aug 2007

Yup, GreenMiles ...

Allstate and the other majors are dropping coastal home insurance like a rock, and charging those left with exorbitant rates. That's why only the truly rich are buying now, since you need insurance to finance a mortgage, right? But if you're in the million dollar club, you just pay more and get TOTAL replacement. Meanwhile us poor dicks living on the coast would probably get 50 cents on the dollar, get paid off some low-ball check, and told we'd never be able to buy insurance in a coastal hurricane county ever again. I suppose we'd have to run for the hills.

To call it "adaptation" is really an insult. It's called getting screwed at both ends ... unless you're mega-yacht rich. /sammie

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 9:25 PM on 29 Aug 2007

"we've adapted"?!

The citizens of New Orleans "adapted" to Hurricane Katrina? Not those whose bodies were infamously, scandalously seen floating in what used to be streets, days after the levees broke. Not those dogs and cats, left behind by their people, and never rescued, who could not escape, and for whom conditions got too tough.

We gravely misuse the word "adapt." In rhetorical applications, the too slick misuse of "adapt" and "adaptation" can be very mischievous indeed. Not to say evil.

Basically, "to adapt" is "to make something or someone well-suited to a certain purpose or circumstance." Hence, in the passive form, we might say, "The panda is well adapted to living in the bamboo forests of southwestern China." And similarly, "The coyote is well adapted to living in arid regions of North America." And, "Most marine organisms bearing calcareous exoskeletons and shells are not well adapted to rising levels of CO2 in the ocean."

Whether the biblical God, or some other being that could be referred to as a god, or some other intelligent power, or some impersonal unintelligent power, is the agent, does not really matter at present. Grammatically, "to adapt" is first of all transitive: there is a subject, and a direct object; and so there is an obvious passive form, "to be adapted," to a purpose or state or condition or circumstance.

But then, there is an important usage which should be called reflexive-absolute. "The panda does not adapt [itself] at all easily to other environments." "The coyote adapts [itself] with little difficulty in many new circumstances." "These marine organisms do not adapt [themselves] to ambient water of high acidity."

OK, fine, thus far the grammar. Unfortunately, rhetoric takes over here. And ethics. And politics. Being able "to adapt," in the latter usage, is too often seen as a sign of virtue. It is too often connected to courage, perseverance, and cleverness. The virtues of many a coyote, Norway rat, and red fox. And of many a human being. By no means all of us, however.

But when it comes to catastrophes, what comes into play, whether we live or die, is not our "adaptations." It is luck, really.

A visitors' center at Yoho National Park in the Canadian Rockies, the British Columbia side, not far from where the famous Burgess Shale was discovered, with remarkable evidence of Cambrian biodiversity, about which Stephen Jay Gould wrote his wonderful book "Wonderful Life," shows in an alcove a video of SJG delivering a message, in which he astonishingly uses one simple adverb, on top of two complex adverbs, on top of a participial adjective: "If a volcano erupted near by, and poured rivers of lava over everything within miles, even the most perfectly Darwinianly adapted organism, adapted to life in a pond beneath that volcano's peak, could not survive."

Does anybody in that pond survive, after the eruption and the lava flow? If so, it is a matter of chance. The slouches have the same chance as the champions. "Virtue" does not come into question.

As for Katrina, late August, 2005, New Orleans: People are in some respects different from Cambrian biodota. But let us not dare assume that our personal "virtue" determines our personal "adaptability."

Who would dare say, "Those who survived were those who deserved to, those who died were those who deserved to"?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 12:20 AM on 30 Aug 2007

a hurricane is a hurricane

are global warming hurricanes the reason should people shouldn't be living along the southern coast? From what I saw of a map of risk areas of everything in the US, hurricane areas are the worst with earthquake areas second. All else doesn't come close.

It's the living in hurricane areas that's the problem.

by trock at 8:18 AM on 30 Aug 2007

Cheese

Yeah the Dutch live lower than sea level for a large part. They also decided to construct proper sea defenses. Something they have done well. Something they are already doing in many other places. Including now New Orleans. The Dutch will get rich of adaptation.

by MarkUK at 9:22 AM on 30 Aug 2007

Adapt to conditions like 55 millions years ago?

First, the ocean rise this century will be measured in meters, not centimeters like the IPCC claimed.

Second, Leemans and Eickhout (2004) found that ecosystem adaptive capacity decreases rapidly with an increasing rate of climate change.

If the rate should exceed 0.4 C/decade, all ecosystems will be quickly destroyed. The global average temperature today is increasing by 0.2 C/decade.

This increase is caused by greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere decades ago, due to the lag time between emission and temperature rise.

We have emitted nearly double the greenhouse gas since then, and are increase our emissions at a rate of over 3% per year.

The bottom line is that within the next couple of decades it is likely that the carrying capacity of the earth will drop precipitously.

The Pentagon has written a report predicting what will happen if abrupt climate change occurs:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903 ...

Finally, adapting to conditions like the PETM is absurd:

"We now have evidence from the Earth's history that a similar event happened fifty-five million years ago when a geological accident released into the air more than a terraton of gaseous carbon compounds. As a consequence the temperature in the arctic and temperate regions rose eight degree Celsius and in tropical regions about five degrees, and it took over one hundred thousand years before normality was restored. We have already put more than half this quantity of carbon gas into the air and now the Earth is weakened by the loss of land we took to feed and house ourselves. In addition, the sun is now warmer, and as a consequence the Earth is now returning to the hot state it was in before, millions of years ago, and as it warms, most living things will die." (The Revenge of Gaia)

by dobermanmacleod at 4:08 AM on 31 Aug 2007

Adapt...To Summer Vacation!

The Bailo Model...a quantum computer model that uses entanglement to make predictions across multivariate data...predicts that the result of Global Heating will be like...Summer Vacation all year.

Warmer summers...warmer winters.

Sea levels will fall.

Weather will be more consistent and better.

A bad day will be a few clouds.

A good day will be beach weather.

More sunny days mean more solar energy available. There will be less need for insulated housing, and heating fuels. Cars will be more efficient. We won't have to work as hard to make as much stuff...so we might get 3 months off for vacation, like in Europe.

Overall it will be like being on summer break all year long.

Yeah.

I can like "adapt" to that.

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by jabailo at 11:22 AM on 01 Sep 2007

Katrina was not made more intense by warming

"Nor am I saying global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, although warming probably did make it more intense."

I have to call you on this one.
No serious scientist is making any such claim. Katrina was just your standard, super-destructive, awesome, hurricane. It had nothing to do with global warming.

by carboncat at 5:43 AM on 04 Sep 2007

Depends what you mean by "adaptation"

If you mean "the human race somehow survived," I suppose it is true that we adapted in the past. But the cold winters and wet summers of 1315-17 in Europe brought famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people; entire civilizations were wiped out when changes in rainfall patterns meant the Fertile Crescent stopped being fertile; a 300 year drought beginning in 1150 devastated the Anasazi culture in what is now the Southwestern U.S., and people only returned to the area when the rains did; in 1816 "the year without a summer" caused by dust from a volcanic eruption led to famine and rioting, as the already fragile safety-nets of the poor broke down (sounds familiar)...

Many human beings have and can survive abrupt climate shifts, but I'd prefer a more active type of adaptation that lets us avoid the famine.

by eriqa at 12:59 PM on 04 Sep 2007

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